Aaron's Rod eBook

Josephine was an artist. In Paris she was a
friend of a very fashionable dressmaker and decorator,
master of modern elegance. Sometimes she designed
dresses for him, and sometimes she accepted from him
a commission to decorate a room. Usually at her
last sou, it gave her pleasure to dispose of costly
and exquisite things for other people, and then be
rid of them.

This evening her dress was a simple, but a marvellously
poised thing of black and silver: in the words
of the correct journal. With her tight, black,
bright hair, her arched brows, her dusky-ruddy face
and her bare shoulders; her strange equanimity, her
long, slow, slanting looks; she looked foreign and
frightening, clear as a cameo, but dark, far off.
Julia was the English beauty, in a lovely blue dress.
Her hair was becomingly untidy on her low brow, her
dark blue eyes wandered and got excited, her nervous
mouth twitched. Her high-pitched, sing-song
voice and her hurried laugh could be heard in the theatre.
She twisted a beautiful little fan that a dead artist
had given her.

Not being fashionable, they were in the box when the
overture began. The opera was Verdi—­Aida.
If it is impossible to be in an important box at
the opera without experiencing the strange intoxication
of social pre-eminence, it is just as impossible to
be there without some feeling of horror at the sight
the stage presents.

Josephine leaned her elbow and looked down: she
knew how arresting that proud, rather stiff bend of
her head was. She had some aboriginal American
in her blood. But as she looked, she pursed her
mouth. The artist in her forgot everything,
she was filled with disgust. The sham Egypt
of Aida hid from her nothing of its shame.
The singers were all colour-washed, deliberately
colour-washed to a bright orange tint. The men
had oblong dabs of black wool under their lower lip;
the beard of the mighty Pharaohs. This oblong
dab shook and wagged to the singing.

The vulgar bodies of the fleshy women were unendurable.
They all looked such good meat. Why were their
haunches so prominent? It was a question Josephine
could not solve. She scanned their really expensive,
brilliant clothing. It was nearly right—­nearly
splendid. It only lacked that last subtlety which
the world always lacks, the last final clinching which
puts calm into a sea of fabric, and yet is the opposite
pole to machine fixity.

But the leading tenor was the chief pain. He
was large, stout, swathed in a cummerbund, and looked
like a eunuch. This fattish, emasculated look
seems common in stage heroes—­even the extremely
popular. The tenor sang bravely, his mouth made
a large, coffin-shaped, yawning gap in his orange
face, his little beard fluttered oddly, like a tail.
He turned up his eyes to Josephine’s box as
he sang—­that being the regulation direction.
Meanwhile his abdomen shook as he caught his breath,
the flesh of his fat, naked arms swayed.